Bottles containing liquids, and in particular wine bottles, present a challenge to packers and shippers. Often today, bottles are shipped in cartons, with cardboard dividers between bottles to keep them from moving around and breaking against one another. Previously, wooden crates were often provided with appropriate retainers to constrain movement of the base of bottles, such as found in old soft drink cases designs. In other fields of endeavor, such as in the shipment of light bulbs or in the shipment of bottled water, various stacking supports have typically been employed.
Various materials and structures have been suggested, attempted, or actually used for receiving bottles and holding them for staking in horizontal layers. Some disclosures have suggested the use of a support and spacing member for bottles, formed from expanded polystyrene foam. However, certain characteristics of polystyrene foam make it less than ideal for use in bottle supports. This is because expanded polystyrene is rather rigid, relatively brittle, and thus has a minimum of structural flexibility. Additionally, polystyrene foam bottle cradle supports do not typically compactly nest together and thus storage of cradle supports manufactured of polystyrene or similar plastic materials usually takes up considerable space.
One alternative to polystyrene foam bottle cradles has been the development and use of bottle cradles made from papier-mâché. Unfortunately, in many circumstances, papier-mâché is inadequate for bottle cradles. For example, the strength of papier-mâché supports rapidly degrades when they get wet. Consequently, papier-mâché bottle cradles must be protected from the weather, and cannot be used in some humid environments. Such weather protection is especially difficult during transport, and requires that such bottle cradles be shipped within a fully enclosed container or trailer. Further, even though bottle cradles manufactured from papier-mâché have improved stackability over foam type supports, the papier-mâché bottle cradles must be of substantial thickness to support the weight of glass bottles and their contents, especially if many layers are desired.
Therefore, it can be appreciated that there still remains a need for an improved bottle cradle design which can be manufactured utilizing a material that would reduce the storage space requirements of bottle cradles, so as to free up warehouse space. And, there remains a need for a strong, weather-proof, preferably recyclable material which can be utilized in the production of compactly stackable bottle cradles.
In the various figures, it should be noted that the use of subscripts still generally refers to the structure so named without the subscript, but such subscripts are merely used for convenience in identifying similar structures in either uniformly stacked or back-to-back pairs of bottle supports, to distinguish similar structures in bottle supports formed and/or used together.
The foregoing figures, being merely exemplary, contain various elements that may be present or omitted from actual implementations depending upon the circumstances. An attempt has been made to draw the figures in a way that illustrates at least those elements that are significant for an understanding of the various embodiments and aspects of the invention. However, various other elements of the bottle supports providing bottle cradles are also shown and briefly described to enable the reader to understand how various features, including optional or alternate features, may be utilized in order to provide a compact, efficiently nestable, reliable material structure for a bottle cradle stacking support.